Bandcloud 287

EVERYTHING IS UNCERTAIN! SOON THERE WILL BE NO DJS! NO GIGS! JUST NEWSLETTERS!

Sara Oswald & Feldermelder - Folding Deltas
This is the first track released from a collaborative album from a cellist and a synthesist. Weird abstract sound shapes come against unexpected cello styles, far from traditional modes but instead taking the instrument and exploring what's possible with a bow, two hands and four strings. 

Klara Lewis 'Ingrid (excerpt)' (EMEGO 270)
I love Klara, I really do, but €25 (incl shipping) for a single-sided LP is a bit much imho. Thank goodness for digital eh? Funnily enough it's €4 on Bandcamp. Obviously there's a discussion on the value of ~art~ but I'll save that for another day/outlet. This is really beautiful and haunting, growing ever more dank and decrepit. It's a five-minute excerpt from a 21-minute piece so I do look forward to hearing the lot. 

Kelly Jayne Jones & Jon Collin - Stockholm, 14 February 2019
Swirling guitar drones, haunting flute, the most romantic sounds of all.

Laura Cannell - BE ONE - The Tallest Tower
This project is amazing. Laura Cannell invited her fans and followers to share recordings of bells with her, so that she could make music inspired by these recordings. I for one shared a recording I made of the bells of the Belfort in Bruges. This track here is around a recording by Rosie Higham-Stainton of a church in Norwich. It's haunting and inspired. Some 100 recordings were submitted from around the world, and Cannell says each will be used to make a new piece of music. Here's hoping she doesn't go all Sufjan on us...

RL 011 - SOLID BLAKE (live at radiant love)
Four whole hours of Solid Blake, recorded in September last year. 

MHYSA - NEVAEH
I loved MHYSA's 2017 album, and this one follows in that vein with more beautiful vocals and strange electronic sounds. It features a lot of acappella singing and lots of weird music, but it just works. Take for example 'sad slutty baby wants more from the world', which is made up of a sample from SWV's 'Can We', looped and looped over stark, austere sounds, rendered fuzzy and terrifying like a swarm of bees. There's a lot of influence from 90s rnb, like this track for example, and 'breaker of chains' features MHYSA revisiting Lauryn Hill's vocals on Nas's 'If I Ruled The World'. 'BELIEVE Interlude' eschews the soft vocals for a raw power that's almost unheard of in many styles, even metallers don't give off this ENERGY. There's something pure and raw about it. I almost don't have the words, but this is a fascinating piece of work that deserves your full attention.

Nailah Hunter - Soil: Song from Silence
This is just one track and it's only a minute long but wow! I've had it on repeat. It's beautiful ghostly harp surrounded by floating plaintive vocals. An album is due to follow and I can't wait to hear more. The art is incredible too.

Sophia Zhuravkova - Earthood. live set
Wowee what a set. Starts off weird and strange and ambient, gets a bit deconstructed abstract crashy noisy, then gets into digital fuzz and fog. Weird but good. 

Norah Lorway - dark bloom
Four short tracks of dark synthy noise.

Green-House - Six Songs for Invisible Gardens
It was actually hearing this and being on the Leaving Bandcamp page that brought me to Nailah Hunter above. I tweeted this album and someone said "80s new age tape, but make it cute". Which, cool! This one is very new age, being an album designed as a communication tool for plants and the people who care for them. It's made up of six tracks or pieces if you will, each named after a plant or part of the plant's makeup. Soft, gentle bells float over lapping water, resonant tones offering balm and hope. Synths dance over trilling birdsong. It's lush and powerful and gentle all at once.

diane barbé - HEROINES in Georgia (2019)
I'm not fully sure what this is, as the artist gives no clues. Live performance? Art piece? Make-believe? Rehearsal? Unusual vocal performances grow out of playful conversations. Gongs play out over looped speech recordings. The evening sounds of a contemporary art centre. What I'm guessing is that this is the work of a bunch of people holed up in Art Villa Garikula, some 75km from Tbilisi. I love it.

Collectress - Different Geographies
This is such a wonderful album. I really love it. Described as chamber music for the 21st Century, it's an album that moves from idea to idea, sound to sound, retaining a solid sense of weirdness throughout. I feel like it's part folk, part classical, part anything goes. There's a large amount of strings and flute over Korg keyboards that makes it a perfect meshing of new and old, without being too reductive about it. It's an album I loved to get lost in, almost feeling like different works at the same time.